There’s been some fairly interesting chatter in the SEO world over the last few days due to a suspected BigMouthMedia penalisation. We’re not ones to jump to conclusions(!) but there doesn’t appear to be a clear answer. So, let’s look at what has been happening.
Background
Big Mouth Media (BMM), Europe’s largest independent digital marketing agency have been growing at a significant rate from their inception in 1997. With reputable board members including Lastminute’s CEO Ian McCaig and MTV’s executive Richard Tan, they have kept a high profile and respectable ship. BMM are also known for their long term, white hat tactics….
Has it always been so rosy?
BMM haven’t always been whiter than white. Their SEO operations have always been testing the limits of the Google’s guidelines. In 2006 they received a penalty and supposedly upset some of their customers due to some hidden link spam. The threadwatch node as more information.
What happened this time?
What could BMM have done this time to incur a penalty? Was it an automated penalty or a manual job? As John at SiteVisibility wrote, BMM are no longer appearing for their top phrases like search engine optimisation or affiliate marketing. For a short time, they were also not appearing in the Google Cache – a bad sign.
What might they have done wrong
- A misconfigured domain from g-maps.com?
- They might be hitting the Google filter for too many internal links
- BigMouth messed up their CMS and got a ton of nasty permalinks with URL variables
- They may be using old hidden text on their pages (no evidence and this is unlikely)
- Google may be aware of the link requests that they’re sending out (see below)
Are these links requests acceptable under the Google TOS?
Your Name
[REMOVED]
Email
[REMOVED]@bigmouthmedia.com
Message
Hi there, I’ve been reading Insiders View and saw that you have a some very interesting insurance focused blog posts. I saw your posts on GoCompare and Swiftcover and thought they were very relevant to the news that [REMOVED]are releasing. [REMOVED] have been busy doing some research on peoples lifestyles during the recession and I was wondering if you would be interested in receiving news from [REMOVED] that might be of interest to your contacts and readers online? We would be able to provide you with news as and when it happens about [REMOVED], keeping you at the forefront of any news that they are about to release. If you think this would be helpful then please let me know and I will keep you posted. If this isn’t relevant, please accept my apologies and I won’t contact you again.
Kind regards, [REMOVED]
Just so you know, I work for bigmouthmedia, a digital marketing agency and [REMOVED] are our client.
The Insurance IndustryAn Entrepreneur's Perspective
{ 1 trackback }
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Of course that link request wouldn’t be against Google’s TOS – Why would it?
Trying to find faults that aren’t there?
absolutely nothing wrong with making another site aware of your content to gain links, as ultimately editorial control is still there.
Yeah don’t see any issue with that email. It’s just typical PR trying to see if a website would be interested in the news from a certain company. There’s no requests for links, editorial control is there and there is no incentive given by BMM to accept the news or post links.
Craig,
Are you really saying that this is not in violation of the Google TOS:
“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
BigMouth are not offering content based on their generosity – it’s purely to build links. This isn’t a post about whether it’s right or whether everyone does it. It’s about why BMM may have been penalised.
They are back now, looks like it was a glitch.
George,
You pretty much answered your own question by citing that quote.
There is no mentioning of buying or selling links in the email you’ve posted, and of course the email is send to build links…common practice for anyone wanting to increase their exposure on the web.
Ed,
BMM are buying links in the sense that they are paying not with money but with content. The G TOS doesn’t stipulate that actual money needs to change hands.
In this example, it’s a case a classic barter and exchange – still a form of purchasing as there is a seller and a buyer.
Goods: Content
Seller: BMM
Buyer: Blog Owner
Goods: Links
Buyer: BMM
Seller: Blog Owner
In this case, as the Links and Content are of equal value and the Buyer and Seller are directly opposite, it becomes an exchange and no money changes hands.
I’m with Ed – what SEOs consider link building, traditional media agencies consider PR. Would you think it was spam if it had been sent from a traditional PR agency?
Caroline,
That’s exactly what I’m getting to.
PR, link building and to some extent all of marketing can be put in to this area. I’m not saying it’s wrong but the semantics of ‘purchasing’ are frequently blurred.
I don’t think you can say if it’s an SEO company it’s blackhat whereas if it’s a PR company it’s whitehat. It’s not that simple.
If BMM were to offer money would you then say this is against the TOS? What about a content exchange?
I think what Google is against is no editorial control exists when money is offered for a link.
So how the content a webmaster chooses to link to is found is another story. Actually Google could just change its TOS to avoid all the confusions:
You can only link to a website when no third party’s influence is in place, especially the stakeholders of the linked to website did not previously contact you in any way.
“…especially the stakeholders of the linked to website did not previously contact you in any way”
I was going to say how difficult it would be to track that if Google even dared to try. Then again, it is the almighty Google!!
I don’t think this type of request violates Googles TOS, don’t think it even mentions a link does it?
Actually Google guidelines encourage the sort of e-mails you got: “Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.”